Recent technological advances have improved the ability to transmit and deliver information in a fast and efficient manner. In accordance with such advances, it is becoming increasingly popular to acquire and store data at a central provider location and to deliver the data to end users quickly upon request. This model may employ technological concepts such as multimedia streaming, in which multimedia content may be constantly received by and presented to an end user while being delivered by a provider. One rapidly expanding area is the use of streaming technology to deliver graphics content such as video games. When streaming graphics content, a provider may access the requested graphics content, render the graphics content from scenes into images, and then encode and transmit the images to an end user over a network such as the Internet. The term scene, as used herein, refers to a representation that may be used in association with generation of an image.
While streaming and other content delivery technology provides many benefits, any model that relies on transmission of data across a network may necessarily be subject to at least some of the drawbacks associated with network communications. Such drawbacks may include, for example, reductions or changes in available bandwidth due to network congestion or other problems. These and other drawbacks may affect both the transmission speed and the quality of the delivered content. End users may become quickly frustrated when they receive content at lower speed or lower quality than expected. In some cases, such disruptions may affect the user experience to such a degree that the content becomes at least temporarily unusable. End users of content such as video games, which often require continual user interaction and rapid response, may be particularly sensitive to reductions and disruptions in delivery quality.